Survivor Voices
Klaus Stern
Survivor Voices
In 1942, Klaus was a young, newly married man in Berlin, Germany. With the rise of the Nazi party, Klaus began to feel increasingly ostracized, even among his childhood friends. On the 19th of April 1943, both Klaus and his wife Paula were deported to Auschwitz. Upon their arrival, they were separated and would remain so for the next 25 months – unable to send word to one another or confirm that the other was still alive. Klaus survived Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, Flossenburg, Leonberg, and Mühldorf. He was liberated in May 1945 by American troops.
After regaining some of his strength in an Allied hospital after liberation Klaus began the process of searching for his wife. He wrote her a note and sent it with several soldiers going in the direction of Paula’s hometown. Klaus traveled for 3 and a half weeks through war-ravaged Europe to finally reunite with his wife. They immigrated to the United States the next year and became the first Holocaust survivors to settle in Seattle.
Stories of Local Survivors - Klaus and Paula
"With My Own Eyes" Exhibit Passport - Klaus
Map 
Video Testimony
Video 1 – “My best friend Walter”
Transcript [PDF]
Video 2 – “Identity Card”
Transcript[PDF]
Video 3 –“The Tattoo”
Transcript[PDF]
Video 4 – “Reunion with Paula”
Frieda Soury
Survivor Voices
“I grew up celebrating Passover and Christmas. I knew I was Jewish but religion was not a central part of my life. When Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, my religion came to define me.” – Frieda Soury
In 1943, at the age of 14, Frieda was deported to Theresienstadt, a concentration camp in her native country of Czechoslovakia. Frieda was designated a “mischling,” meaning half-Jewish: Frieda’s mother was not Jewish, but her father was. Frieda was assigned to a room with more than 20 other girls. She remembers that the Jewish girls in her room came and went (later she learned they were deported to Auschwitz or other camps) while she and the other mischling stayed as inmates. Frieda worked on the camp’s farm, planting, tilling, harvesting, and moving rocks. While back-breaking labor, this afforded her the opportunity to occasionally steal an extra piece of food. Of the 140,000 people sent to Theresienstadt, 15,000 were children, only 1,500 of whom survived the war.
Theresienstadt was liberated by the Russians in May 1945. Upon being freed, Frieda’s father acquired transportation for his family and other children from the same hometown and brought them all back to Ostrava. When she was 18, Frieda went to Israel where she met her husband Aaron. They had three children and then immigrated to the United States. Frieda is a member of the Holocaust Center’s speakers bureau.
Stories of Local Survivors - Frieda
"With My Own Eyes" Exhibit Passport - Frieda
Map
Video Testimony
Video 1 – “My dog”
Transcript 1 [PDF]
Video 2 – “14 years old”
Transcript 2 [PDF]
Video 3 – “My Mother’s Visit”
Transcript 3 [PDF]
Susie Sherman
Survivor Voices
“The thinking was that Hitler was a clown and the thinking people would not believe him and this would all go away.”
Susie Sherman was born Susanne Rindler on January 31, 1935 and spent her first few years in the small town near Karlsbad (now called Karlovy Vary), in Czechoslovakia. The Rindlers (her father’s family) and the Zenters (her mother's family) had lived in Czech lands since the 1700’s. Both her grandfathers served with distinction in the Austro-Hungarian Empire during World War I.
In the Munich Agreement of 1938, leaders from Britain, France and Italy met in Munich and agreed that Hitler could annex the Western third of Czechoslovakia, which included Susie’s hometown of Karlsbad. By the end of 1938, the Nazis had seized her family’s businesses and homes.
After Nazi occupation, Susie’s father, and one uncle, anticipated that the worst was still to come. They quickly made arrangements to leave the country. They traveled from Karlsbad to Bardejov, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia) back again through Prague, through German towns with the help of Quakers, on to Holland and finally England. Taken in by the Lord and Lady Cotesloe, the family stayed in England until they were able to immigrate to America in 1943 on one of the few civilian convoys permitted to cross the Atlantic. The rest of the family was deported to the camps of Terezin, Auschwitz, Treblinka or Maly Trostinec. All perished in these camps except one uncle, Karl Rindler. The uncle that had left with Susie’s father passed away in England.
Susie has done extensive research in order to trace the paths of her extended family members and to better understand their experiences and struggles during the Holocaust.
Video Testimony
Video 1 – “Waiting It Out”
Transcript [PDF]
Video 2 – “Marbles”
Transcript [PDF]
Video 3 – “Living with the Lord and Lady”
Transcript [PDF]
Video 4 – “Terezin”
Transcript [PDF]
Map
Timeline
Photos
Czech family and friends in Seattle
English sailor gives Susie buttons
German Troops march into Czechoslovakia
Life in Terezin
Rindler Brothers
Rindler Family in Karlsbad
Rindler Fink and Cotesloe
Susie's parent on their honeymoon
Uncle Karl
Uncle Karl leaves for America
Hester Kool
Survivor Voices
[She] says to me "I can get you into hiding because eventually they will get you also." So she got me a false passport and I had to go on the train and I had to meet this gentleman in a church... and I stayed in his house for two and a half years.
Born to a Jewish family in Amsterdam, Hester (Waas) Kool and her brother Isaac were raised by their parents in the small town of Zandvoort alongside the North Sea.
On May 10, 1940, Nazi forces invaded and occupied the Netherlands. Hester was thirteen. All Jews in the Netherlands were forced to sew the yellow star on their clothes and all families living along the coast were forced to move. Hester's family was among those who were moved to Amsterdam in May of 1942. The Waas family stayed with an aunt and Hester, not allowed to go to school, worked as a seamstress in a factory, sewing materials for the Germans.
Hester's mother, father, and brother received a notice to report for a work camp. They were deported to Westerbork and from there taken to Auschwitz. "I didn't get a notice to report so my parents told me to stay behind. I never saw them again." (Hester Kool, 2002 interview)
Hester never received an order to leave and remained in Amsterdam. Shortly after her parents were deported, her friend Rosa, a member of the Dutch Resistance, helped Hester obtain a new identity and a place to hide. The van Westering family hid Hester for two years. Hester cleaned the house, slept in the attic and served as a nanny during her time at the van Westering home. All the while, she recorded her lonely experience in a diary.
When the war ended, Mr. van Westering prevented Hester from leaving their home. With great courage, Hester ran away from the van Westering house to Amsterdam. She stayed for two more years before immigrating to the United States because "there was nothing left for [her] in Holland. [She] wanted to start a new life." Hester arrived in the US in July 1947 and a month later she met her husband Sam. They were married the following May, and started a family that now includes children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.
Inspired by her children's questions and a Zandvoort panel at an Anne Frank exhibit, Hester started to tell her story in 1995. She is a member of the Holocaust Center's Speakers Bureau.
Video Testimony
Video 1 – “Going into Hiding”
Transcript [PDF]
Video 2 – “Loneliness”
Transcript [PDF]
Video 3 – “My Most Precious Thing”
Transcript [PDF]
Map
Timeline
Photos
Hester@Assumption 5.29.09 009
Hester Kool 1939 Holland
Hester Kool Diary
Hester Kool Diary
Hester Kool Diary
Hester Kool with Uncle
Hester Kool with van Westering children 1945
Hester Isaac and Father
Sam and Hester Kool Boston, MA 1948
Waas Parents
Magda Schaloum
Survivor Voices
Magda Schaloum was born in 1922 in Gyor, Hungary. Following the German occupation of Hungary on March 19, 1944, the Nazis began systematically depriving Jews of their rights and forcing them into ghettos. They forced Magda and her family to leave their home and then deported her, her brother, and their mother to Auschwitz.
Through the window of the cattle car, Magda saw her father desperately trying to give them a package filled with food and essentials. The guards beat him brutally and took the package, telling him they would give it to his family. Instead, they kept it for themselves.
Magda's father was sent to forced labor in the coal mines and the Nazis eventually transported him to the Buchenwald slave labor camp in Germany. Magda's sister avoided deportation thanks to protective papers from the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. Wallenberg was later recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.
The Nazis deported Magda, her mother, and her brother. After riding for days in a squalid cattle car, Magda arrived in Auschwitz only to be separated from her brother, 15, and her mother, 56.
At the end of June 1944, Magda was sent to the infamous slave-labor camp Plaszow, near Krakow. At the end of August, she was sent to Augsburg, Germany, to work as a slave laborer in a factory. She and other workers looked out a window and saw the first snow beginning to fall. In a chain reaction, one worker began crying, then another, until everyone was in tears and wondering what was happening to their families and loved ones. Were they out in the snow without any protection? Were they even alive?
In April 1945 at Mühldorf, another slave labor camp, Magda met her future husband, Izak, a Sephardic native of Salonika, Greece. Their stay at Mühldorf was brief. The Nazis loaded them onto a cattle wagon with other survivors to be transported to an unknown spot to be murdered, but Allied troops liberated them along the way.
“When we heard about groups that denied the Holocaust, we decided that we had to speak out,” Magda says. “If you hear somebody deny the Holocaust, you can say, ‘I have seen and heard a survivor.’”
Magda Schaloum was an active member of the Holocaust Center for Humanity’s Speakers Bureau.
Stories of Local Survivors - Magda
"With My Own Eyes" Exhibit Passport - Magda
Map
Video Testimony
Video 1 – “To the Ghetto”
Transcript 1 [PDF]
Video 2 – “An opportunity to hide”
Transcript 2 [PDF]
Video 3 – “Arriving in Auschwitz”
Transcript 3 [PDF]
Video 4 – “Slave labor”
Transcript 4 [PDF]